HARTFIELD, England, July 12 (UPI) -- A commonly held belief that eye movement can indicate if a person is lying or telling the truth is unfounded and should be abandoned, British researchers say.
Proponents of so-called Neuro-Linguistic Programming have claimed when a person looks up to their right they are probably lying while a glance up to their left shows they are telling the truth.
Researchers at two British universities say tests have shown the idea has no basis in fact and are urging the public and organizations to abandon this approach to lie detection.
Scientists at the University of Hertfordshire and the University of Edinburgh filmed volunteers as they either lied or told the truth, carefully recording their eye movements.
In a second study another group of participants was asked to watch the videos and attempt to detect the lies on the basis of eye movements.
"The results of the first study revealed no relationship between lying and eye movements, and the second showed that telling people about the claims made by NLP practitioners did not improve their lie detection skills," Hertfordshire researcher Richard Wiseman said.
"A large percentage of the public believes that certain eye movements are a sign of lying, and this idea is even taught in organizational training courses," Edinburgh researcher Caroline Wyatt said.
"Our research provides no support for the idea and so suggests that it is time to abandon this approach to detecting deceit."
